Regardless, wherever you come down on McCarthyism, Communism, and the rest is a matter of opinion. What is a matter of fact — unmitigated, irrefutable, undeniable fact — is that there were hundreds of Communists working for Moscow, directly or indirectly, in the United States during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

The Rosenbergs were guilty and got what they deserved. Alger Hiss too. Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon, Morton Sobell, William Perl, Alfred Sarant, Joel Barr, and Harry Gold were all either pawns or lackeys of a foreign and evil foe. We know the Hollywood Ten were all Communists, but what else they were we can't know for sure, because they believed taking the Fifth was more important than protecting the country (and if you think it's unfair to cavalierly call people who devotedly followed the Moscow line for all their adult lives "Communists," I sure hope you don't ever call, say, President Bush a "fascist" on the basis of no evidence at all). The American Communist Party (CP-USA) was in fact a Soviet franchise.

In other words, you are free to describe McCarthyism as a witchhunt if and only if you are willing to concede that actual witches existed in our midst. The evidence — from declassified Venona transcripts, Soviet archives, memoirs, etc. — is still mounting, but what we have so far is plenty in itself. In 1996, Nicholas Von Hoffman wrote an essay for the Washington Post that caused no small amount of hysteria on the American Left, which has been milking its myths and denial for decades.

McCarthyism was the product of the "paranoid style" in American politics. There were no witches — only zealots and brown-shirted bullies.

The playwright Lillian Hellman declared: "The McCarthy group — a loose term for all the boys, lobbyists, congressmen, State Department bureaucrats, CIA operators — chose the anti-Red scare with perhaps more cynicism than Hitler picked anti-Semitism."

Yet, as Hoffman reluctantly conceded, these assessments were in turn lies, myths, and carefully constructed distortions. The reality was that "in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much… The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught."

But even as honest liberals like Von Hoffman were coming to grips with reality, many on the Left decided to take another approach. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the Left was largely content to describe McCarthyism in Hellman's terms: a baseless assault by right-wing paranoids and fanatics. But in the 1990s — as the evidence against the Rosenbergs, et al., became undeniable and the general obsession with Marxism was replaced by an obsession with postmodern sexual gobbledygook — the Left began rewriting the moral of McCarthyism.

The saddest part of watching your posts on the forums is that, if even the tiniest particle of you actually cared about the country and wanted to save it from the ills you speak of, you would actually try to save it. You would present all your heaps of evidence for people to see, and not call them "little leftists" and other pejoratives. The condescension you drip like acid burns away any tiny threads of interest that might begin to form as people read the things you link. Just as someone might think, "Hmmm, this is an interesting article, I wonder if it might be true, after all" you spit your venom in their face. Even if what you believe and talk about is true, you won't allow anyone to see it, all they see is your rancor and the scowl of disgust on your face as you look at them.

Which is fine. But at least don't pretend like you actually want to teach anyone anything. It would be like a kindergarden teacher coming into class and screaming at the little children, "I want you to read you little F-ers. F--- you and open your books, disgusting bastards,open them now," then kicks her desk over in a furious spasm of anger, and after stands wheezing at them with spit running out of her mouth. And yet she can't figure why none of her kids embrace her teaching.

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